Barnsley in South Yorkshire is the town that has been most affected by austerity cuts in recent years.
Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

That Barnsley has been found to be so harshly affected by a near-decade of austerity cuts comes as no surprise to Susan Round, 61, owner of the Pats for Pants underwear stall in the town centre’s covered markets. “I do think it has got worse. The state of the roads. Social care. The hospitals. Antisocial behaviour. Spice.”

According to the Centre for Cities thinktank, Barnsley council spending has reduced by 40% over eight years – around four times the average reduction faced by cities in the south-east – since the coalition decided in 2010 that local government would bear the brunt of austerity and the poorest boroughs would shoulder the biggest cuts.

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Roughly £145m has been stripped from the deprived South Yorkshire borough’s annual spending, equivalent to £688 for every resident. About 2,400 jobs have gone and services are being tightly squeezed and chopped. Nationally, no councils have escaped cuts but working-class northern communities such as Barnsley have had it worse than others.

On the Weigh and Save market stall, amid barrels of cereals and dried fruits, Tim Steele, 30, has experienced the cuts. He used to work with vulnerable families in a local Sure Start centre but lost his job when budgets were cut. He wonders what happened to those families. “The need is still there but there is nothing for them.”

What’s changed? He sees more homeless people on the streets. “A few years ago you never saw that,” he said. Antisocial behaviour is more noticeable, the police are less visible and it is almost not worth bothering with the GP because appointments have to be booked weeks in advance, he added.

Times are hard, said Steele. Lots of people struggle to pay the bills and there’s an urgent sense that the cuts have gone too far. “We all pay our taxes and we need to see that tax go somewhere. The NHS needs it, the police needs it, the council needs it.”

In Barnsley town hall, council leader Sir Stephen Houghton laughs grimly when the prime minister, Theresa May’s, pledge last year to end austerity, is mentioned. “We’ve lost half our workforce. The council is basically run on the goodwill of the remaining staff. Volunteers help clean the streets. We are reaching the limit now.”

Two-thirds of the street cleaning budget has gone, along with a quarter of library spending and 100% of the tourism budget. Youth clubs and Sure Start centres have closed and grass verges go uncut. Services are often slower: “If you reported fly-tipping you used to expect it to be sorted in 24 hours; now you wait two weeks.”

On the other hand, Barnsley spends more on social care, up 2o percentage points since 2010. Strikingly, 62% of the entire council budget goes on looking after vulnerable adults and children – the biggest of any of the areas looked into by the thinktank. Demand is rising as the population gets older and child poverty rates, which are as high as 40% in some wards, rise.

The rise is unsustainable, said Houghton. The fear is that the council will be forced to shut down everything else it does to meets its legal obligations to deliver social care. “You don’t have to cut the grass, clean the streets or mend the roads. But really, who would want to live in a place where you don’t do those things?” said Houghton.

Jane Holliday, far left, works with vulnerable older people in her role as chief executive of Age UK Barnsley. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

Jane Holliday, the chief executive of Age UK Barnsley, said the steep rise in adult social care spending reflects soaring demand, rather than evidence of a lush panoply of service provision. Care is tightly rationed, the quality often poor. Hurried care visits leave no time for a chat or a cup of tea with lonely clients. Some frail older people who don’t qualify for council help struggle with cleaning, shopping or gardening.

A few years ago, the council ran a free handyman service and a shopping service for older residents who needed a bit of support with everyday chores. These have been cut, said Holliday, and for those without family nearby the effect can be isolating. “We’ve had people who have been sat in the dark for a couple of days because the fuse blew and they couldn’t fix it.”

The once-thriving coal mining community is now England’s 39th most deprived authority. Levels of unemployment and economic inactivity are higher than the national average. Life expectancy is lower than the England average and winter death rates from flu and respiratory disease are higher than average. The council believes this is partly the result of entrenched poverty and ill-health.

Barnsley Foodbank Partnership, which did not exist five years ago, now runs 11 outlets. Ironically, it gave out fewer food parcels last year, not because there was less hardship but because a community project in one of the borough’s poorest wards – one of its main referral agencies – was closed down. That austerity cut meant there was no one to refer hungry people for a food voucher. “We are clear there’s been no reduction in need,” said food bank chair Mick Neal.

Dan Jarvis, the Labour MP for Barnsley central, said the human impact of years of government cuts to council services, alongside cuts to welfare benefits such as the bedroom tax and universal credit, has been an accumulation of stress and misery for local people. “Life for my constituents, in work or out of work, has become harder. I see a lot of desperation and despair.”

There is little faith that the government public spending review later this year will herald good news. Ministers don’t recognise that deprived areas have higher social spending requirements, said Houghton. He fears that areas such as Barnsley, where social need is highest but the ability to fund services locally weakest, will lose out further. “If you ran the NHS on that basis there would be rioting.”

For all the gloom, back in the town markets, there’s a proud resilience. The town is used to hard knocks. Round is optimistic about the council’s £180m regeneration scheme, which has revamped the legendary market and will bring a cinema. “Barnsley is what it is,” she said. “It declined, but it is coming back a heck of a lot.”

A few stalls away, Dave Wilson, 63, who runs Dave & Dave fruit and veg, agrees. He thinks that Yorkshire comes off worst in the north-south economic divide, and says the NHS is struggling. But he’s philosophical: “You’ve got to be optimistic. You can always lie down and die. But if you don’t try, you don’t get nought.”

• This article was amended on 7 February 2019. An earlier version referred to the town of Barnsley as a city. The research looked into cities, and included Barnsley; the definition used by the Centre for Cities thinktank encompassed neighbouring towns and villages in the metropolitan borough of Barnsley.